Daily Archives: April 16, 2017

After a long road trip to open the season, the Atlanta Braves will finally open their new home, SunTrust Park, on this coming Friday. When they do, the fans will get to take in a unique beer that is only sold at the ballpark. Fitting in with the Braves and their tomahawk chop, the beer is Chopsecutioner, a bat wood aged IPA. Wait, a bat? Like a baseball bat? Yes, Terrapin Beer Company, based in Athens, Georgia, has created this beer that uses Mizuno baseball bats as part of the process. The logo:

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By William Hicks | 1:29 pm, April 14, 2017 If you read the lamestream media, you may get the impression that Nazis are everywhere. Even in the once pure and idyllic furry community (people who dress up in plush animal costumes and sometimes have sex in those costumes, although furries will say that is not the point of the fandom) the press is giving credence to a rise of furry Nazidom.And now the fur is flying.While we’ve written about Nazi furs and the “Altfurry” movement before, most of the Nazis in the furry community are ironic trolls or simply furries who fetishize the outfits and Nazi military history (look up Wehraboos).But that’s not important. The issue at hand, making headlines from the Denver Post to the The Daily Beast was the cancellation of the Rocky Mountain Furry Convention, a gathering of about 1,600 furries going back annually for 10 years.The event was cancelled after back and forth “threats” made on Twitter by antifa (anti-fascist) and an anonymous person who were considered “credible” by the police, which resulted security costs of the event to skyrocket to around $22,000. Antifas are known for their strong arm tactics and their willingness to use violence to “stop fascism.”

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School children are being spied on by tech companies through devices and software used in classrooms that often collect and store kids’ names, birth dates, browsing histories, location data, and much more—often without adequate privacy protections or the awareness and consent of parents, according to a new report from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).EFF’s “Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy” shows that state and federal law, as well as industry self-regulation, has failed to keep up with a growing educational technology industry. At the same time, schools are eager to incorporate technology in the classroom to engage students and assist teachers, but may unwittingly help tech companies surveil and track students. Ultimately, students and their data are caught in the middle without sufficient privacy protections.One-third of all K-12 students in the U.S. use school-issued devices running software and apps that collect far more information on kids than is necessary, the report says. Resource-strapped school district can receive these tools at steeply-reduced prices or for free as tech companies seek a slice of the $8 billion dollar education technology, or ed tech, industry. But there’s a real, devastating cost—the tracking, cataloguing, and exploitation of data about children as young as five years old.

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Documents and computer files released by hackers provide a blueprint for how the U.S. National Security Agency likely used weaknesses in commercially available software to gain access to the global system for transferring money between banks, a review of the data showed.On Friday, a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released documents and files indicating NSA had accessed the SWIFT money-transfer system through service providers in the Middle East and Latin America. That release was the latest in a series of disclosures by the group in recent months.Matt Suiche, founder of cybersecurity firm Comae Technologies, wrote in a blog post that screen shots indicated some SWIFT affiliates were using Windows servers that were vulnerable at the time, in 2013, to the Microsoft exploits published by the Shadow Brokers. He said he concluded that the NSA took advantage and got in that way.

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Babies who aren’t old enough to walk or talk still manage to exhibit racial bias, according to a new study. The research found that infants prefer to learn from adults who share their skin color.As part of the study, researchers from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and the University of Toronto – along with collaborators from the US, UK, France and China – gave infants a series of videos to watch.In each video, a female adult looked at one of the four corners of the screen. In some videos, an animal image appeared in the direction she had looked. In other films, an animal image appeared at a non-looked at location.The results showed that the infants followed the gaze of members of their own race more than they followed the gaze of members of other races.

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Apple has hired a small team of biomedical engineers to work at a nondescript office in Palo Alto, California, miles from corporate headquarters. They are part of a super secret initiative, initially envisioned by the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, to develop sensors that can noninvasively and continuously monitor blood sugar levels to better treat diabetes, according to three people familiar with the matter.Such a breakthrough would be a “holy grail” for life sciences. Many life sciences companies have tried and failed, as it’s highly challenging to track glucose levels accurately without piercing the skin.The initiative is far enough along that Apple has been conducting feasibility trials at clinical sites across the Bay Area and has hired consultants to help it figure out the regulatory pathways, the people said.

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(NEWSER) – Fear in the community is holding back information about the unsolved massacre of eight family members in southern Ohio nearly a year ago, investigators said Thursday. Some of that fear is of retaliation by the killers, and some is fear of witnesses incriminating themselves over their own criminal activity—likely involving drugs—unrelated to the slayings, investigators said. “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind or in any investigator’s mind that there’s information that may be part truth, but not all the way true,” said Pike County Sheriff Charles Reader. Witnesses who come forward will be treated fairly, said Attorney General Mike DeWine, whose office is leading the investigation. The focus is on the homicide, not those individuals’ crimes, he said, per the AP.On April 22, 2016, investigators found seven adults and a teenage boy from the Rhoden family shot to death at four homes near Piketon. A newborn, another baby, and a young child were unharmed. One of the victims, Christopher Rhoden Sr., operated a commercial marijuana growing operation on his property “with the purpose of distributing the marijuana,” according to DeWine’s office. Reader on Thursday pleaded for more donations to the reward fund, stuck at $10,000 for several months, for information leading to a conviction. The sheriff hinted that the victims’ involvement in drug crime may be holding people back from donating. Both DeWine and Reader said they expect an arrest someday, with DeWine saying “significant progress” has been made and the case is still his office’s top priority. Despite a massive investigation, no arrests have been made and no suspects identified.

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Researchers at McAfee and FireEye have disclosed another case of email-based hacking methods which can be used to compromise a fully updated and patched Windows operating system, even Windows 10.The attack vector lies in the form of an unpatched zero-day bug present in all the running versions of Microsoft Office. The root cause lies in an important Office feature known as Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). It allows applications to embed and link to documents and objects.

According to the researchers, a victim opening a suspicious Word file – embedded with an OLE2link object – in an email would trigger winword.exe to initiate an HTTP request to the attacker’s remote server. This results in the download of a malicious .hta file (HTML Application executable) on the victim’s machine. To the user, the HTA file appears as a Microsoft Rich text document with a .doc extension. It also conceals the file from anti-virus software on the machine.

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Prices of popular brands of potato chips in Japan surged as much as six times the retail price after the country’s two major snack companies announced a sales halt due to a potato shortage.The halt reportedly came as a result of a poor potato harvest following typhoons and flooding, which hit Japan’s northern main island of Hokkaido last August. The region provides nearly 80 percent of the country’s potatoes.